And soon he found that he looked now upon the world with eyes from which a veil had been withdrawn. Barbara gone, mother Earth came nigh to comfort her child. He had always delighted in the beauty of the world--in what shows of earth and air were to be seen in London. The sunset that filled as with a glowing curtain the end of some street where he walked, would go on glowing in his heart when it left the street. Even in winter he would now and then go out to see the sunrise, and see it; and from the street might now and then, at rare times, he beheld a dappling and streaking, a mottling and massing of clouds on the blue. The fog of the London valley, and the smoke of the London chimneys, did not _always_, any more than the cares and sorrows and sins of its souls, blot out its heaven as if it had never looked on the earth. But he had learned much since he went to the country; he had gone nearer to Nature, and seen that in her lap she carried many more things than he knew of; and now that Barbara was gone, the memories of Nature came nearer to him: he remembered her and was glad. Soon he began to find that, both as regards Nature and those whom we love, absence is, for very nearness, often better than presence itself. He had been used to think and talk of Nature either as an abstraction, or as the personification of a force that knew nothing, and cared for nothing, was nobody, was nothing; now it gradually came to him, and gained upon him ere he knew, first that the things about him wore meanings, and held them up to him, then that something was thinking, something was meaning the things themselves, and so moving thoughts in him, that came and went unforeseen, unbidden. Thoughts clothed in things were everywhere about him, over his head, under his feet, and in his heart; and as often as anything brought him pleasure, either through memory or in present vision, it brought Barbara too; and she seemed their maker, when she was but one of the fair company, the lady of the land. Everything beautiful turned his face to the more beautiful, more precious, diviner Barbara. With each new sense of loveliness, she floated up from where she lay, ever ready to rise, in the ocean of his heart. She was the dweller of his everywhere!